military training

GadgTecs: US Army Getting Training in Virtual Environments Created From Actual Cities. “The U.S. Military can now prepare soldiers for combat in specific, challenging settings with the push of a button. That’s because of virtual reality. Satellite imagery, street view data, and other readily-available information about our world rapidly generate these Synthetic Training Environments (STE), based on a US Army white paper. Artificial intelligence renders the digital worlds based on the available information, analyzes soldier performance to make the trainings more effective, and introduces variability into the simulations to keep troopers on their toes.”

National Defense: Industry Developing New Social Media Simulation Tools for Military Analysts. “…social media has only become more intermingled with military operations. Not only can average citizens tweet about them in real time, but military analysts can now also use platforms such as Twitter to find nuggets of information about persons of interest, or gauge the political temperature of a region. To meet that demand, industry is developing new training software to help analysts better comb through piles of data taken from websites like Facebook and Reddit. One such system is SimulationDeck, a software platform developed by Nusura, a Denver-based technology company. The system is able to replicate traditional media such as radio, television and newspapers, along with web platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.” Its version of Twitter is called BleatDeck.

Defense One: A New Social-Media Simulator Is Helping US Troops Train for Hybrid War. “The U.S. military is using a new simulator to prepare intelligence analysts and public affairs officers for the social-media front of future wars. A computer program by Cubic is helping to train these troops to sort through tweets, other social media posts, and real and fake news; figure out which posts might be pouring fuel on a local fire; and react to them. The simulator, called the Social Media Replication Toolkit System, is being incorporated into training and wargames by military units all the way up to combatant commands, company reps said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington.”

Library of Congress: Library and U.S. Military Academies Sign Cooperative Agreement. “The Library of Congress and the five U.S. Service Academies today entered an inter-agency cooperative agreement to support growth of service member representation in the national collections at the Library, including within the Veterans History Project. The agreement also provides enhanced research access to Library collections for the U.S Air Force Academy, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, U.S Military Academy and U.S. Naval Academy and enhanced access to service academy collections for Library researchers.”

ResearchBuzz Firehose

The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content divvied up into individual posts, with a bit more commentary than the regular RB. There will also be additional resources that I think are too narrowly-focused or just not on for ResearchBuzz. If you're interested in digest-type posts just a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.